This tells me LibreOffice has become a threat to Microsoft, and I'm here for it.
If anyone else is curious what it's like, LibreOffice's site is here. Highly recommend.
using Microsoft Word for too long makes me break out in Tourette's
Writer is so much more understandable
Word is proof that there is no God and that we're all alone in the cold vacuum of space. Word is every traffic light being red. Word is getting an itchy arsehole because you couldn't quite wipe yourself properly.
It tells me microsoft is petty
They literally blew billions of dollars and years of developer time just to screw the companies that won the argument of “open internet or Microsoft protocol” back in the day. Yes, petty.
Large corporations have zero empathy for competition.
What will their quarterly report say? Think of the stockholders. (/s)
It's not even that. It's way smaller potatoes down in the org chart.
People always say "why would large company do this" and the answer is almost always that guy 7 or 8 rows down the org chart needs this to get their bonus this year and that point gets distilled into 1 bullet in a power point presentation that is summarized by chatgpt.
I visited a local Microsoft office in the mid-90s. Their office employee kitchen had a poster of the Internet Explorer logo smashing the Netscape logo to a bloody pulp.
Probably has something to do with more and more things like this happening:
https://cybernews.com/news/france-lyon-microsoft-office-tech-adoption/
Why do I feel like any customer support has been replaced by ai and it has led to this show of shit?
Mafia shit cause the mob boss is the President.
No real reason to be using a hotmail account in this day and age, even less so if you're a developer of a direct competitor for Microsoft.
What alternative do you recommend that won't be blocked by Google and Microsoft? I hate Microsoft, but I can't even sign up for a Google account, and everywhere else I've tried is blocked by Google, Microsoft, or both.
I self-hosted my email from 2006-2021, and do not have the stamina to do that any more.
I just don't really value email accounts much. I have several and only rarely check them.
Eh, that's the problem with email - it's much harder to change and migrate, because you can't guarantee others will use your new email, much less find out who somehow still has the old email to send messages to and expects a reply from.
Unless you own the domain. Then switching providers is a simple DNS/MX/DKIM/DMARC update.
Also you can get locked out of other services that use email for 2FA and password resets
This is an argument for having your own domain for emails. There is an annual cost but at least your address isn't locked to a specific provider sokcd you can change some DNS settings to point at a different mail server.
I’ve been with Tuta mail for years now and it just keeps getting better. It’s not free, but I believe that that’s why it’s a good choice. They’ve add the calendar app and are expanding to cloud storage.
Eh, that's when you just turn on auto-reply/forwarding and abandon it.
But of course they need to be able to access it to enable auto-reply. :)
This. Don’t ever delete the account because someone will scoop it up and impersonate you. Just set auto reply and log out. Check the terms, you may need to log in every 6 months though. Do that a couple of times at least.
Do they even still issue them? Like prior to ~2007 Hotmail was THE free email to have before Google, like, did it better. But aren't they issuing outlook.com addresses now?
Dunno... the last time I dealt with it was someone trying to reach my mom and couldn't.
I asked them to verify the address...
@hotmale.com
Oh, well there's your problem!
Oh, well there's your problem!
Or is it?
-yup, it is :-/
When MS ditched the Hotmail name, they went to their "Live" branding. I have an account with that domain, in addition to my old Hotmail account.
I wish I held onto my old Yahoo account, but it got so full of spam that it became completely unusable; so I deleted it 🫤
Yahoo still exists. Somehow. Apparently the brand is extremely popular in Japan, Yahoo Japan is on the list of top 50 visited websites. IIRC the brand was bought by Verizon, and I have no idea if Yahoo even offers web search anymore.
Apparently Yahoo uses Microsoft Bing for their search backend.
How the hell are we down to two meaningful web engines and two meaningful search engines?
There's Firefox and everyone else, and everyone else uses Chrome.
There's Google and everyone else, and everyone else uses Bing.
Relying on American companies is a liability in of itself.
While there is corruption everywhere and on a standardized basis, there are of course countries with higher levels of corruption, the US is the #1 source of corruption and criminality in the world. Additionally it's the ideological centre for global oligarch/criminal gangs.
Microsoft's monopoly in Windows and Office alone results in extraction of hundreds of billions of dollars from companies and individuals all around the world.
We really need some consumer protections around emails.
Imagine if your landlord could just intercept your mail on the same way.
It's part of our identities.
We're living in the Wild-West of the internet
MS ❤️ Open Source
(/s)
Microsoft going down the shitter
What isn't made clear is if this had anything to do with him being a LibreOffice developer. Or just the usual Kafkaesque bullshit that happens when someone's account gets flagged for "suspicious activity" or whatever and they cannot get a real human being to help or reverse the problem.
Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail's account recovery process.)
Anyone who has projects on Github they care about, you might wanna move it to self-hosting or another git host while you still can, because once MS gets tired of killing e-mails, Github repos are probably going to start getting sniped next.
This isn't a conspiracy...
It's the reality of using Hotmail as a business account in 2025.
Which is frankly nuts.
But the author even says the same thing happened to them before too
95% of senior government officials across Africa will give you a fancy-ass, taxpayer funded, full color laminated plastic business card that lists their email address for official business as Gmail or Hotmail.
Like... Today. Right now. I used to have a collection. Once got one with a 3D hologram thing. Fucking hotmail and gmail address.
Yep, I don't remember the exact phrasing, but in these situations, I assume incompetence before I assume evil intent.
Maybe it is intentional but the incompetence is in how obvious they are.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetentance
Is the saying, but it's definitely not always true.
By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.
Whenever I see a story of "some guy who relies on working loses access to it and suddenly can't do anything anymore" I think "this can never happen to me". Which means there's a whole category of problems you're suddenly never going to see. It also means you're less naive. So just don't vendor-lock yourself in. Don't put a log-in for an account which you don't control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.
On top of that, you'll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I'm just saying, if you don't even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you'll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.
I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it's probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn't vendor-lock yourself in.
I have this exact same thought. I see things like this and I'm like, God, I'm glad I don't have any of that shit.
Who in their right mind uses hotmail?
I am a newbie in LibreOffice, but I am wondering whether me chronicling my first experiences in it would be worth doing.
I think what we sorely lack is more people like Nick and Michael Horn making approachable tech news about this niche.
I understand that to some the idea itself of the tech news cycle, focused on its own navel all the time is not appealing, but I think that is exactly there that a channel like this could distinguish itself, showcasing OSS solutions having an impact on the public good, something the usual news outlets cannot afford to do since every second is lost revenue.
The only risk is being boring.
I think it would be worthwhile, and probably help some people.
Can someone suggest me good alternatives to both Microsoft's mailing system (Outlook, etc.), and to Github, just in case?
Self hosting email is HARD if you aren't an expert but I figured it out. It took a while to get it stable and usable but man it has felt so good being in control of my email. Worth the effort. I use mailu, which is docker based. Works great.
Id argue it hard to set up, we not hard just lots of interconnecting pieces, but once you are going it's very easy to maintain. I just set up an email server from scratch in a about a day.
EU should really create rule to use only EU FOSS tech for goverment services. For all member states.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
